A Top Scientist's Research Is Under Attack

By JANE E. BRODY

Published: May 6, 2004

A prominent Canadian researcher is facing claims that data in his widely reported study of a nutritional supplement's effects on thinking and memory in the elderly are so flawed as to have no real value.

The scientist, Dr. Ranjit Kumar Chandra, is internationally known for his many contributions to the field of nutrition, and his work has been widely cited in professional and lay publications alike, including The New York Times.

Scientific journals and three independent American scientists have raised questions about the validity of Dr. Chandra's findings, saying the study, published in September 2001 in the journal Nutrition, has statistical irregularities and inconsistencies, and is characterized by improbable research methods.

The study purported to demonstrate striking cognitive benefits for people over 65 who took a daily multivitamin-mineral supplement that Dr. Chandra formulated and has since patented. He licensed the rights to the supplement to the Javaan Corporation, founded by his daughter, Amrita Chandra Gagnon. The company, in Somerville, Mass., sells the supplement as Javaan 50.

Late last year, in response to objections raised by the three independent scientists, Nutrition's editor, Dr. Michael Meguid, published an editorial acknowledging that Dr. Chandra's paper had serious statistical flaws.

In an interview by e-mail, Dr. Meguid said he was unaware when Nutrition published the study that it had already been rejected by the British medical journal BMJ. Dr. Richard Smith, the editor of BMJ, said scientists who reviewed the paper had found the methods and statistical findings so unlikely that they wondered whether the study had actually been done.

Reached by phone in Gurgaon, India, where he now lives, Dr. Chandra said, ''Anyone with different views should repeat the study and see for themselves whether my findings can be confirmed or not.''

He added that any royalties he might receive from the supplement were to be donated to education.

No one has yet established whether Dr. Chandra did in fact do all the cognitive tests and statistical analyses that he claims in the journal article to have carried out.

When officials at Memorial University of Newfoundland, where Dr. Chandra worked for 27 years, asked to examine the study's raw data, he replied that they had mysteriously disappeared when the university moved his office. A university spokesman, Dr. Jack Strawbridge, denied any mishandling of Dr. Chandra's papers, adding that without the raw data and with Dr. Chandra now retired and out of the country, Memorial was unable to investigate the matter.

The three scientists who recalculated Dr. Chandra's published results, however, said they could make no sense of them.

One of those scientists, Dr. Saul Sternberg, an experimental psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who has advanced training in statistics, said in a telephone interview that he had found ''statistical anomalies and inconsistencies, measurements that were impossibly large.''

Another experimental psychologist, Dr. Seth Roberts, who studies learning and memory at the University of California, Berkeley, said in an interview that he found the reported effects of the nutritional supplement unbelievable.

''The statistics were not just implausible,'' Dr. Roberts said, ''they were impossible.''

The two psychologists, along with Dr. Kenneth Carpenter, an emeritus professor of nutrition at Berkeley, said they had then found similar statistical aberrations in a previous report by Dr. Chandra, published in The Lancet in 1992 and based on the same group of elderly participants.

In the Lancet report, which has been lauded as a landmark contribution to the field of nutrition and immunity, Dr. Chandra concluded that his supplement greatly increased the participants' immune responses, halving the number of infections they suffered.

The question now is whether Dr. Chandra actually did what he reported to have done in the two studies and, if so, whether he analyzed the findings correctly. He stands by his methods, saying in the interview that ''there is more than one way to do statistics.''

Dr. Meguid, of Nutrition, pointed out in his editorial that flawed research could have far-reaching consequences.

''The public uncritically believes the claims emanating from such studies,'' he wrote, ''and fellow scientists and funding agencies divert precious resources to attempt to reproduce or verify published data.''